Selects: Plant Migration

**Josh** (0:00)
Hey, guys, it's me, Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our August 20, 23 episode on plant migration. This one makes me a brainy boy.
What with its earth science and something that goes on under our noses without us really realizing that it's happening. And we figure out that there's a lot to learn about plants on the move, which makes it even sweeter. I hope you love this one as much as I do.

**Chuck** (0:29)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:39)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the We're All Melting edition.

**Chuck** (0:47)
Yeah. Just a migrating fern.

**Josh** (0:51)
Oh, that's a good one to be.

**Chuck** (0:53)
Blowing through the forest, looking for a new home.

**Josh** (0:57)
Sure.

**Chuck** (0:58)
I'm a spore.

**Josh** (0:59)
What happens when you get there, spore?

**Chuck** (1:01)
Well, I'll probably grow into a beautiful new fern, because ferns are pretty party.

**Josh** (1:07)
That's awesome. And I'll bet you'll contribute to society in all sorts of beneficial ways that ferns that were already there couldn't necessarily do.

**Chuck** (1:16)
I hope so. There is fern stuff in here, and I have a wonderful fern scene at my camp.
On the other side of the feeder creek that goes into the main creek, I call it, I even have a sign, this is fern forest. And it's a forest of ferns. It's quite lovely.

**Josh** (1:32)
God knows where they're from, because these things can travel quite a bit, as we'll see.

**Chuck** (1:35)
Yeah, they could be from, from, from Alabama.

**Josh** (1:40)
Easily. I'm not kidding. Easily, man. I've got a stat that's going to blow your mind in a second.

**Chuck** (1:46)
Oh, well.

**Josh** (1:47)
Actually, I'll just bust it out now. You ready?

**Chuck** (1:49)
Yeah. How far can a fern travel?

**Josh** (1:51)
A fern can travel, the Tasmanian tree fern in particular, can send its spores 500 to 800 kilometers. It's 300 to 500 miles from the mother plant. And get this, a single frond, a frond, produces more than 750 million of those spores.
So you can understand that ferns, I mean, you find ferns everywhere. They're really hardy. They can actually survive colder temperatures than you would think. They also thrive in the tropics. They're like a really great pioneer plant. They usually are among the first large plants that show up in like a newly cleared part of earth, right?

**Chuck** (2:35)
This all makes sense then.

**Josh** (2:36)
Okay, so what we're talking about then is that those ferns that showed up in this new place and said, hey, let's get this biosphere going again. Let's get this biome back into shape after this wildfire or something like that. Or there was like a stampede because there was a really great ice cream truck that drove through. One of those two.
Those ferns have migrated. They came from Tasmania, apparently, all the way to wherever the ice cream truck was. And now they're there. And so they actually moved in that sense, which is really surprising because plants are what are known as sessile organisms. They don't move from place to place individually as organisms. But as a species, they can actually move around like inchworms pretty good.

**Chuck** (3:23)
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I didn't really know much about this. We're talking about plant migration and the idea, well, not idea, the very real fact that just like humans and animals will go to more hospitable times as the climate may change or just, I don't know, just to seek a better place to be, plants and trees and things en masse do the same thing.

**Josh** (3:49)
Yeah, and there's all sorts of ways that they do that too. So they do it by dispersing their seeds or their spores in that case, fern spores or single cell organisms. They're not like a seed technically, but they do the same thing, right?
They show up in a place and set up shop and they start rocking out.

**Chuck** (4:09)
Yeah, that's right. And ferns, you know, it depends. And we'll get all into this stuff. But how fast this happens depends on different factors. How far these plants can migrate depends on different factors.
Why this is happening is generally climate change.

**Josh** (4:28)
Yeah.

**Chuck** (4:29)
And plants and trees and things are generally moving north or up in elevation if they hit mountains.

**Josh** (4:37)
Or south in the southern hemisphere.

**Chuck** (4:40)
Exactly. So, this is sort of the general pattern. And we mentioned ferns because, like you said, those spores can really haul. Ferns also mature very quickly. And, you know, the wind can just...